How I stay lean eating as much as I want

After 10 years of tinkering, I finally found it the diet one that not only allows me to effortlessly maintain a six pack year round, fuel strength and muscle gains, feel great and always be satisfied without the need to track a single calorie, but one that’s actually simple and feels like I’m eating a cheap meal with every bite I take. I eat as much as I want, it’s delicious, and I stay lean while making gains in my strength training. That to me is hacking the game. And at this point, I can hardly believe that I ever ate boring food or restricted myself when an everyday just feels like a holiday, even though my physiques the best it’s ever looked and felt. So we talk a lot about theory, but I thought in this video I’d share what I actually eat to implement the principles of nutrition.
Every single day. We’ll go through a full grocery hall and I’ll show you each of the basic components of my diet and what I choose for each, and we’ll also go through supplements and performance enhancers. So stay tuned to the end for that. There are basically two reasons we can be hungry. Either we need more calories, energy, or we need more of the essential nutrients that also come with food. The thing to realise with your diet is that if it is lacking in those essential nutrients, then we’re going to be hungry regardless of whether we actually need more energy or if that energy is just going to end up stored as body fat. For example, if you’ve way undereat on protein, even though you’ve already hit your day’s energy target, how does your body get you to eat more protein? Well, it makes you hungry.
Even though that’s going to come at an excess of calories, at least it’s going to hit its basic protein needs. And so if our diet is lacking in protein or other essential nutrients, then we’re just handicapping ourselves, pitting ourselves against our appetites in an effort to not overeat, while at the same time depriving ourselves of essential nutrients that would make our lives our training, our muscle mass, our energy levels all better. So in light of that, there’s basically two things we want to get right with our nutrition. First, we want to make sure we get enough protein in each day, and the second is to get the bulk of our energy from nutritious food sources, which as I’ll show you, is actually the simplest food because nature sorted that out for us. But we just do those two things. Something incredible happens, which is our appetites actually start working properly rather than being in chronic overdrive waste telling us to eat more, they’re now sensitive to the amount of energy we actually need.
Once we satisfy our nutrient needs, our appetites just regulate to get us the right amount of energy in, and that means we can just listen to our appetite, feel good and be making exactly the type of progress that we need to for our body without needing to think or track calories or do any calculations provide you doing some basic strength training, which doesn’t need to take more than 40 minutes a week. Once we get this diet right, we’ll either naturally eat in the calorie deficit until we’re lean or if we’re already lean, we’ll naturally eat in a slight calorie surplus to support muscle gain and get even leaner with time. So how do we achieve that? It’s really simple. Here’s how I think about nutrition now, and this process has made life just so easy and enjoyable. I basically think about my diet as having protein sources and then everything else.
That’s it. You make everything you put in your body as delicious as possible and your life is good. Now, there are two principles that actually make this work. You follow these very hard to go wrong. The first is base your diet on single ingredient foods. Not everything you eat but the bulk, and I’ll walk you through exactly what that looks like for me. The second is to prioritise protein until you hit your daily target. These two principles basically guarantee that we nail our criteria for a nutritious diet, and then you can pretty much eat to your heart’s content and feel amazing. So as it’s priority, let’s start with the protein side. Stable for me here is red meat, so lamb or beef to make eating my daily protein target, effortless, old chuckle isn’t a slow cooker to divide it up. That’s the base of my lunch.
500 grammes of basically any animal protein will get you about a hundred grammes of protein. And so that’s the bulk of my first meal every day. All sweet fish, seafood, pork, chicken, usually one of those at dinner, depending on the day. Next thing is eggs to try and buy. Reasonable quality ones. Get these in throughout the week. Six eggs has about 40 grammes of protein and they’re delicious, highly nutritious. And then the other main protein sauce is dairy. So I’m a fiend for cheese. I’ll usually have this on my lunch melted with my meat or just as a snack, any types of cheese that I can find. I’ve got Swiss cheese and parmesano ano here and some fresh mozzarella milk for having with coffees on the weekend. And then one of the biggest hacks, if you’re struggling to eat enough protein, low zero fat Greek yoghourt.
This tub of Chobani has about 90 grammes of protein in it. So that’s protein sauces for me. Meat, eggs, dairy with a pound of meat and some cheese. I’m hitting a hundred to 120 grammes of protein at lunch every day, which means for my 140 gramme daily target, I’m basically sorted once I’ve had my first meal. And that’s principle two sorted. And bear in mind, this meal is amazing. It’s delicious. I look forward to it every day. Nothing is more satisfying with all of this stuff. What you want to figure out is just what tastes the best to you. Because good nutritious food should also be the most delicious food. So I’ll see as my meat with lots of spices to taste. I’ll use liberal amounts of quality sea salt. When you’re actually eating real single ingredient food, you need salt because we’re not getting a shit tonne of it through processed food.
So I’m liberal with my use of this. Put it on everything. Again to taste. If you’re cooking leaner cuts of meat, I suggest using fats. I use butter or extra virgin olive oil for cooking and preparing with what I choose here. I’m already getting plenty of essential fats from my meat, from my dairy, from my eggs, from avocados. So these extra fats are just for cooking and flavour. I also love pickled stuff like sauerkraut, kins and sauces, namely hot ones. Mustard, however is most enjoyable to eat it. Combining single ingredient real foods, the more nutritious probably is. Once you do these things, you realise that your body will actually guide you very well as to what it needs. So your goal is actually just to enjoy your food as much as possible. And in terms of hitting this daily protein target, I delete my FitnessPal.
Now all the numbers that I ever use are on the screen here. Much better to keep this simple. Know what’s in the foods you’re eating regularly. Have a ballpark figure in your head that you can refer to that’s accurate as you need to be. If we get within ballpark range of our protein target, then this is going to work brilliantly. If you go over, it doesn’t matter. Okay, so that’s protein sources. Then we’ve got everything else. For me, the bulk of my remaining food is fruit. I love it. It’s a nutritious source of carbs and you feel like you can basically unlimited amounts of delicious food. I just buy whatever’s in season. Affordable, good quality. Here, we’re getting into summer in Australia, so I’ve got papaya, melon, mangoes, avocados my favourite time of year. I also have frozen berries in the freezer, so that’s fruit.
I’ll have this throughout the day with my lunch if they need more carbs. I’ve got honey, I’ve got dates. And then at dinner we’ll usually have some sort of starchy carbs or rice or potatoes with whatever protein we’re having, and that’s literally as complex as it needs to be. Protein sauces, then fruit, honey, starchy carbs. Now despite the spread here, I don’t want to give the impression that I have a perfect diet or that you need one. Maybe 80% of what I eat is this 20%. Very religiously is just for fun. So every night for dessert, milk, chocolate, ice cream, any other rogue dessert that finds its way into the house, the point is not to be perfect. The point is to get the bulk of your energy from high quality foods. Make sure you’re getting enough protein in because that is what satisfies your appetite.
By that point, you’ve gotten what you need. There is still room to eat garbage, which is why that remaining 20% for me is whatever I feel like it doesn’t make a difference. We destroy chocolate in our household and the average body fat percentage of the two biggest consumers is about 10%. Let that sink in. Is this a perfect diet? No. Does it need to be? No. It’s very nutritious. It works as tempting as it is, do not let perfect be the enemy of good. What I want to show you with this is that a diet that allows you everything you want can be really simple and enjoyable and easy, and if it’s going to work long-term, just like with strength training, it needs to be all of those things. Realise that you could choose any options from within those categories and have a diet without a single food in common with mine and still be getting the same outcome.
Any meat, fish, poultry, seafood will work. Any type of eggs will work, any dairy, any fruit, it’s all going to get you the same outcome. The point is to choose food that you like and that you have access to locally. Now, performance enhances. None of these are necessary, but while we’re on the topic of nutrition, I thought it’s worth breaking down these because these are probably my favourite things out of all of this. Creatine, this is the only supplement that I take. The way I describe the effects of creatine is if normally your strength training sessions look like this, some really strong, some weak, some you just feel a bit off. Being on creatine is like every single session is a peak one. You’re always able to push hard. You’re always motivated too. I always have a good training session when I’m on creatine, and so that’s why for the past few years I’ve just been on it all the time.
It helps. It costs next to nothing. You can get it for well under 40 cents per serve. So my morning routine once I’ve got up, use the bathroom, weighed myself is to have five grammes in a glass of water. That’s it. So if you struggle at all with workout motivation or consistency, I’d highly recommend giving that a try. Second part of the morning routine is coffee. I’m a fiend for this. I live in Melbourne, so here I’ve got an espresso blend to use in my lip pavoni. I’ve got a lever press Italian machine throughout the week, I’ll usually make pour of it. So I’ve got a single origin filter being here. I love coffee. It helps me work, it helps my creativity. It’s the best part of my morning. My rule is to just have as much as I want until midday and then cut it off after that doesn’t affect my sleep.
I’m good. And then the final performance enhancer is black tea. Best part of the afternoon, I’ll brew that with a splash of milk and that’s my relaxing treat to cruise out the pm. That’s it. I hope this feels simple and actionable. A few things to note in terms of results. The leanness part of this depends on your level of muscle mass. By adopting this approach, you’ll get as lean as you can currently sustain for your current level of muscle, but there will be a limit to the level of body fat that you can get down to until you build more. The muscle mass part of things is supported by this diet perfectly, but it’s not driven by it. Muscle gains are driven by training and that’s why strength training is the first place I start with all my students regardless of their goals in terms of fat loss or muscle gain.
So if you do want the best results possible from this, obviously get started with strength training as soon as possible. The muscle and strength you build doing that will also boost your energy and everything else. So generally why strength training is just so important. As I said, you can do it from home, can do it in 40 minutes a week. We teach that method or you can learn through my YouTube, but however you do it, if these are things that you want, get that happening as soon as you can. And then the other thing to note is that if you get these two things right, your diet, as we’ve been through here, your strength training in the long term, you’re sorted. But if you’ve got excess body fat now and you want to change your body composition quickly, then that’s where the total amount of energy that you are taking in matters.
Any diet like this one can get you losing weight, but it only does So insofar as it gets you eating in a calorie deficit, for most people just switching to this heating their protein, eating mainly whole foods, that will result in them hitting a deficit until they are quite lean because as I said, your appetite works properly, everything is solved. But if you want a rapid transformation, you can be more intentional about it. Once these other things are in place and the short term intentional calorie deficit combined with a sustainable, nutritious way of eating like this, you’ll be literally unstoppable at hitting your physi goals very quickly. Again, if you need help with that stuff, links are below. That’s it. Hope it helps. Let me know your thoughts. Happy eating. If you don’t eat meat, then you’ll have to adjust what the protein side of things look like to hit your daily target.
The spread will look similar, but obviously you’ll boost eggs and dairy. Might want to lean heavily into that zero fat yoghourt. If you want, you can also supplement with whey protein. That’s not something I do because I don’t find any need for it eating like this. And it goes against one of the key principles, which is single ingredient whole foods, but without meat in your diet. That might make it way easier to hit your protein target. In which case, go for that. Mix it with milk or yoghourt. Perfect. You’ll notice that the entire protein side of things comes from animal sources. So if you are vegan, applying both of these principles simultaneously is going to be much harder and you’re going to need to be much more intentional about actually covering your nutritional, both for protein and other things. It’s not how it is much more complicated and it’s outside the scope of this video. So if you are going to eat that way, I would suggest doing your own research.